Rupert Brooke's Celebrity Aesthetic

Rupert Brooke's Celebrity Aesthetic Peter Howaeth University of Nottingham "I DO NOT SEE why he need be a poet," Henry James is said to have murmured at the sight of Rupert Brooke.1 If true, his reaction was at once a dazzled compliment to Brooke's extraordinary good looks and a sharp surmise that those looks would always make his poetry a secondary affair, an observation which, in the light of Brooke's subsequent literary reputation, would prove remarkably clear-sighted. Critical discussion of Brooke's poetry has usually focused either on his idealistic attempts at a Georgian, "authentically realistic and contemporary note" or reevaluated his multiple self-presentations and controlled irony as the work of an almost-Modernist.2 But these literary classifications have always taken place in the shadow of Brooke the man and the series of biographies that alternately created Brooke the legend —or taken pains to debunk it. Recently, however, Brooke appears in Aaron Jaffe's Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity as a figure who exemplifies the combination of poet and public myth, the modern literary celebrity. Jaffe's radically historicist strategy is to redefine modernism as "less a periodizing term or a bundle of formal concerns than a historically circumscribed mode of presenting value and prescribing frameworks of expectations."3 Brooke thus appears as an exemplary illustration of the way that modernist poetry actually relies on the very values and expectations of celebrity promotion and marketing that its aesthetics of formal autonomy so strenuously denied. Exploring how Brooke's mythic obituary and photographic image made him the perfect vehicle for Edward Marsh's literary promotion, for instance, Jaffe wittily calls Churchill's infamous Times obituary "one of the most successful product tie-ins in history," which left "Times readers with one instrumental question: where can I get a copy of Brooke?"4 Brooke's poetry sold not on account of its formal power, but because people wanted to buy into Brooke's person, and Jaffe considers this posthumous sales boost 272 HOWARTH : BROOKE entirely of a piece with Brooke's and Marsh's prewar success in establishing Georgian Poetry as a brand name. Thinking of Brooke's appeal in terms of celebrity would seem to confirm James's intimation that Brooke's poetry would never be the foundation of his public appeal. As Timothy Rogers notes, however, James's phrasing echoes Punch's lampoon of Oscar Wilde: "why should he ever trouble to be anything? Why couldn't he be content to exist beautifully ?"5 These Wildean resonances suggest that Brooke cannot so easily be used to illustrate Jaffe's wider thesis, that there is a wholesale contradiction between the official modernist aesthetics of formal autonomy and a real economy of celebrity. Although Brooke's unpublished papers make it clear that he adapted his ideas on art from the radically formalist principles of Walter Pater and Roger Fry, his refomulation of their ideas anticipates and internalises the nascent dynamics of the modern celebrity rather than contradicting them. Like Pater, Fry, and G. E. Moore, Brooke imagines the autonomy of the art object in terms of its relation to an audience, an audience whose perspective is then implicit in the very way his poems present their apparently disinterested perceptions. When Brooke's letters and essays render his own life (and death) as a work of art, they do so from the perspective of this anticipated audience, and like a celebrity carefully stage manage the intimate personal appeal they apparently radiate. In other words, Brooke's flair for publicity meshed with rather than contradicted the presuppositions of his own formalism, which is why James's suggestion of Wilde was so prescient. Wilde's celebration of young men with perfect profiles was part of his cultivation of art's aristocratically useless and idle nature, in opposition to the age's stress on moral or social utility . But by identifying the autonomous realm of art with a particular type of modern figure who existed to be seen, he was, like Baudelaire before him, creating a figure whose aloofness from practical concerns is actually inseparable from the rapt gaze of the admirer. Baudelaire was the first to note...